Which is faster, keyboard or mouse? A large number of programmers believe that the keyboard is faster for all (programming-related) tasks. However, there are a few widely cited webpages on AskTog which claim that Apple studies show that using the mouse is faster than using the keyboard for everythin...

I often talk to startups that claim that their compensation package has a higher expected value than the equivalent package at a place like Facebook, Google, Twitter, or Snapchat. One thing I don’t understand about this claim is, if the claim is true, why shouldn’t the startup go to an investor, sel...

A couple years ago, I took a road trip from Wisconsin to Washington and mostly stayed in rural hotels on the way. I expected the internet in rural areas too sparse to have cable internet to be slow, but I was still surprised that a large fraction of the web was inaccessible. Some blogs with lightwei...

HN comments are terrible. On any topic I’m informed about, the vast majority of comments are pretty clearly wrong. Most of the time, there are zero comments from people who know anything about the topic and the top comment is reasonable sounding but totally incorrect. Additionally, many comments are...

There are a lot of “12 CS books every programmer must read” lists floating around out there. That's nonsense. The field is too broad for almost any topic to be required reading for all programmers, and even if a topic is that important, people's learning preferences differ too much for any book on t...

Joel Spolsky has a classic blog post on "Finding Great Developers" where he popularized the meme that great developers are impossible to find, a corollary of which is that if you can find someone, they're not great. Joel writes, The great software developers, indeed, the best people in every field, ...

I can't think of a single large software company that doesn't regularly draw internet comments of the form “What do all the employees do? I could build their product myself.” Benjamin Pollack and Jeff Atwood called out people who do that with Stack Overflow. But Stack Overflow is relatively obviousl...

Developer compensation has skyrocketed since the demise of the Google et al. wage-suppressing no-hire agreement, to the point where compensation rivals and maybe even exceeds compensation in traditionally remunerative fields like law, consulting, etc. In software, "senior" dev salary at a high-payin...

Tavish Armstrong has a great document where he describes how and when he learned the programming skills he has. I like this idea because I've found that the paths that people take to get into programming are much more varied than stereotypes give credit for, and I think it's useful to see that there...

Do concurrency bugs matter? From the literature, we know that most reported bugs in distributed systems have really simple causes and can be caught by trivial tests, even when we only look at bugs that cause really bad failures, like loss of a cluster or data corruption. The filesystem literature ec...

This is one of those “N technical things every programmer must read” lists, except that “programmer” is way too broad a term and the styles of writing people find helpful for them are too different for any such list to contain a non-zero number of items (if you want the entire list to be helpful to ...

The book starts with a story about a time Margaret Hamilton brought her young daughter with her to NASA, back in the days of the Apollo program. During a simulation mission, her daughter caused the mission to crash by pressing some keys that caused a prelaunch program to run during the simulated mis...

An acquaintance of mine, let’s call him Mike, is looking for work after getting laid off from a contract role at Microsoft, which has happened to a lot of people I know. Like me, Mike has 11 years in industry. Unlike me, he doesn't know a lot of folks at trendy companies, so I passed his resume arou...

These are archived from the now defunct su3su2u1 tumblr. Since there was some controversy over su3su2u1's identity, I'll note that I am not su3su2u1 and that hosting this material is neither an endorsement nor a sign of agreement. Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality full review I opened up a...

These are archived from the now defunct su3su2u1 tumblr. A Roundabout Approach to Quantum Mechanics This will be the first post in what I hope will be a series that outlines some ideas from quantum mechanics. I will try to keep it light, and not overly math filled- which means I’m not really teachin...

Perf is probably the most widely used general purpose performance debugging tool on Linux. There are multiple contenders for the #2 spot, and, like perf, they're sampling profilers. Sampling profilers are great. They tend to be easy-to-use and low-overhead compared to most alternatives. However, the...

2015 was a pretty good year for Intel. Their quarterly earnings reports exceeded expectations every quarter. They continue to be the only game in town for the serious server market, which continues to grow exponentially; from the earnings reports of the two largest cloud vendors, we can see that AWS...

Have you ever mentioned something that seems totally normal to you only to be greeted by surprise? Happens to me all the time when I describe something everyone at work thinks is normal. For some reason, my conversation partner's face morphs from pleasant smile to rictus of horror. Here are a few re...

There's a meme that's been going around for a while now: you should join a startup because the money is better and the work is more technically interesting. Paul Graham says that the best way to make money is to "start or join a startup", which has been "a reliable way to get rich for hundreds of ye...

I haven't used a desktop email client in years. None of them could handle the volume of email I get without at least occasionally corrupting my mailbox. Pine, Eudora, and outlook have all corrupted my inbox, forcing me to restore from backup. How is it that desktop mail clients are less reliable tha...

Jeff Atwood, perhaps the most widely read programming blogger, has a post that makes a case against using ECC memory. My read is that his major points are: Google didn't use ECC when they built their servers in 1999 Most RAM errors are hard errors and not soft errors RAM errors are rare because hard...

In 1999, Butler Lampson gave a talk about the past and future of “computer systems research”. Here are his opinions from 1999 on "what worked". Yes Maybe No Virtual memory Parallelism Capabilities Address spaces RISC Fancy type systems Packet nets Garbage collection Functional programming Objects / ...

Hardware performance “obviously” affects software performance and affects how software is optimized. For example, the fact that caches are multiple orders of magnitude faster than RAM means that blocked array accesses give better performance than repeatedly striding through an array. Something that'...

Typical server utilization is between 10% and 50%. Google has demonstrated 90% utilization without impacting latency SLAs. Xkcd estimated that Google owns 2 million machines. If you estimate an amortized total cost of $4k per machine per year, that's $8 billion per year. With numbers like that, even...

Every once in awhile, you hear a story like “there was a case of a 1-Gbps NIC card on a machine that suddenly was transmitting only at 1 Kbps, which then caused a chain reaction upstream in such a way that the performance of the entire workload of a 100-node cluster was crawling at a snail's pace, e...

I try to avoid making predictions1. It's a no-win proposition: if you're right, hindsight bias makes it look like you're pointing out the obvious. And most predictions are wrong. Every once in a while when someone does a review of predictions from pundits, they're almost always wrong at least as muc...

I love reading postmortems. They're educational, but unlike most educational docs, they tell an entertaining story. I've spent a decent chunk of time reading postmortems at both Google and Microsoft. I haven't done any kind of formal analysis on the most common causes of bad failures (yet), but ther...

If you've followed any tech news aggregator in the past week (the week of the 24th of May, 2015), you've probably seen the story about how SourceForge is taking over admin accounts for existing projects and injecting adware in installers for packages like GIMP. For anyone not following the story, So...

TIL that Bell Labs and a whole lot of other websites block archive.org, not to mention most search engines. Turns out I have a broken website link in a GitHub repo, caused by the deletion of an old webpage. When I tried to pull the original from archive.org, I found that it's not available because B...

Boring languages are underrated. Many appear to be rated quite highly, at least if you look at market share. But even so, they're underrated. Despite the popularity of Dan McKinley's "choose boring technology" essay, boring languages are widely panned. People who use them are too (e.g., they're a ta...